Machine Made Bricks

Heritage of machine made bricks

Our brick making machine made by Berry and Son of Westcliff on Sea in the 1920’s, is one of the last of its kind still operating and can produce up to 12,000 bricks per day. Due largely to the fact that the bricks are demoulded by hand means they have more character than mass produced machine made bricks. Machine made bricks have a smoother texture and have the same colour as hand made bricks but a lower cost.

Machine made brick production largely replaced hand made bricks after the second world war with only specials being made by hand until the revival of hand made stock bricks in the 1990’s.

Drying

Each brick contains a pint of water when it is made, which has to be removed through drying before the bricks can be fired. During drying the brick will shrink by around ten percent, therefore the process must be carefully controlled to avoid cracking.

The heat source for our dryers now comes from wood chip burned in biomass boilers. Once dried the bricks are hand set into the kiln, leaving a finger width gap between each brick to allow optimum firing.

Firing and blending

Our oil fired kilns are fired for around 24 hours taking three days to cool. It then takes two people a week to empty the kiln.

In order to ensure consistent and even colour blends all our bricks are re-blended by hand after being removed from the kiln. This gives greater consistency of colour with our standard ranges and also enables extremely accurate matching to existing brickwork.